Going beyond gods means going beyond devils too

Despite not being religious I’ve managed to believe in a lot of very-metaphorical gods and devils over the course of my life. These gods and devils were - like the traditional ones - clusters of assertions that all right-thinking people had a duty to make, assertions which orient and motivate us towards good behavior, assertions which explain the natural world and the forces of history, assertions which tell us who to revere and who to hold in contempt.

Scientistic atheism, funnily enough, was the first of these gods that touched my life. The physical universe is the ultimate reality and proper object of worshipful contemplation for all. Human history is to be properly understood as the slow and painful struggle to create contemporary science, which everyone now should participate in. The good guys are the smart people, the well-educated with extra-capable neurons. The bad guys are the resentful idiots who try to keep everyone stupid and scared, like them.

Religion, then, became the great devil of my life. It caused and explained all of the evil in the world. It functioned as a paper-thin justification for all the mysticism and oppressive authority that held everybody back, and it made me very angry to think about it. This great paper tiger had had its fake fangs on the throat of humanity for long enough, and finally I was alive to do something about it.

Having a god gave me purpose, worth, and dignity, and when my god slowly fell apart it took those qualities of mine with it too. Piece by piece, assertion by assertion, conversation by conversation, I got to learn that history and humanity is way more complicated than I had figured it to be when I was 17 years old. I had built an identity not around being a good person but around being a better person, someone more tuned in to the holy truth than the people around me, and without a god to anchor that identity it completely fell apart for me.

I still had a devil, though, namely my self. I could hate nothing in other people because I had completely lost confidence in my own ability to track the truth, but I could still hate my self. My life was ruined, and I was the person ultimately responsible for ruining it. I also turned out to be an excellent target for hatred; I could always count on myself to do something or think something or feel something that could somehow justify my self-hatred, plus my own ugly past told me everything I thought I needed to know. Plus, other people tended to kick me out of their lives if I was mean enough to them, but I could torture myself all day long since I had nowhere else I could run.

A great part of my path in sobriety has been gaining empathy and care for that devil, the person I had every reason to hate. It helped to be in a big community of people who were working to do the same thing - people who were working to figure out what legitimate, normal, acceptable, lovable needs motivated their actions, even the ugly and destructive actions that had landed them in trouble. As I did that, as I loosened my righteous grip on the self-hatred I thought was rightfully mine, I also loosened my grip on hatred in general. If I could understand myself as a hurt and scared person struggling to meet their needs as best as I could, then I could understand anyone that way. That didn’t excuse my actions or mean that I should have somehow coasted through life with no negative consequences, but it meant that I didn’t deserve to suffer for the rest of my life. I started feeling the same way about other people too - the people who occurred to me as frustrating or painful in my life, the people I read about in the news who sought to seek and abuse a lot of power - it might be right to express and assert my needs and fight for change and justice on a broader scale, but it no longer meant that I could only be motivated by rage and despair in the process.

I could put down boundaries in a way that I wish people had done to me - I could stand against political opponents without forgetting that they were fellow sufferers like me, that they would be much more likely to move with me if I could show them that I understood about them and cared about them too.

Critically, it’s meant that I don’t have to take my conflicts home with me, so to speak - I don’t have to feel like my world and my self is soaked in the awful stuff that’s ultimately contemptible.

Rage, despair, and dehumanization are completely understandable phenomena in human political activity - what I assert, and what I hope, is that those phenomena are ultimately unnecessary, and that going beyond them will make a lot of new good things possible.